Internet Explorer falls below 60% market share, older IE6 is the second most popular browser

Web page developers rejoice – the monster that haunts your dreams (or as Microsoft call it, Internet Explorer) fell to 59.95% health points, um, I mean market share. This is the lowest point at which IE has been since it took the market from Netscape Navigator during the dark ages.

While Internet Explorer sits at a hair below 60%, the second place goes to Firefox with 24.59%, followed by Chrome (6.73%), Safari (4.72%) and Opera (2.30%). Interestingly, Opera Mini holds 0.79% of the market. The rest are below half a percent.

Okay, to be fair, Internet Explorer 8 isn’t that bad – it’s Internet Explorer 6 that stains its name. IE 8 has 24.66% market share on its own for the top spot, IE 6 is second with 17.58% and Firefox 3.6 just below it at 15.33%.

Our own server logs show that Internet Explorer visitors has indeed dropped to 40% down from the 60% share it used to had last year. We guess a lot of that can be contributed to the new browser choice screen imposed on Microsoft by the EU.

Well, I hope this gives hope to devs that one day they will wake up to a world where they don’t have to use separate style sheets, scripts and workarounds for Internet Explorer 6.

I think that once IE6 is gone, new features (HTML5 stuff mostly) will become more widely adopted.